


Intermission

by EcoFridge



Series: The SkyStuck Chronicles [2]
Category: Original Work
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-06
Updated: 2019-02-06
Packaged: 2019-10-23 04:25:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,126
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17676398
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EcoFridge/pseuds/EcoFridge
Summary: SkyStuck intermission set between Into the Sky Again and Out of the Silent Water





	Intermission

**Author's Note:**

> Bear with me while I experiment

You find yourself lost in the woods on a foggy, rainy afternoon. To your chest you clutch a single vhs tape and some other article of media of your choosing, likely one that means a lot to you. A book or a comic or a movie or something. How did you wind up here? Doesn’t matter, what does matter is that you find the second VHS tape that goes with the one you’re holding, and also that you find your way out of these spooky woods.

Dead leaves crunch under your feet as you walk and you aren’t sure how to make your steps quieter, but you wish you could because right now you are the loudest thing here. Luckily the sound of the rain drowns you out for the most part, although it is a light rain and the pattering noises are mostly coming from moisture collecting and dripping off the leaves on the trees. The smell of damp earth wafts through the air. You head downhill, and stumble upon a creek. It’s a small creek, with several fallen trees crossing over it.

You have yet to find a fallen tree you can actually cross. The creek gurgles happily over the rocks and stones, bubbling and splashing with the gentle rain. Continuing your search for some way to cross it, you begin to wonder why you even care about getting across it dry, considering the rain has already soaked you, and then wonder even further as to why you want to cross it at all. A four-trunked tree that split at the base but all grew from the same spot has fallen cleanly across it some long time ago, and you stumble across this tree just as you consider going back. It will be very easy to cross here.

The bark is a bit slick as you step onto it, but using the other three split trunks for support keeps you balanced. Once you’re across, you head uphill, and at the top of the hill you come across a mysterious dirt road. It’s wide enough for a car to drive on, a bit muddy from the light rain, and appears to have some faint tire tracks on it. You look down one way as far as you can, till the road turns and the trees keep you from seeing where it goes, and then you look down the other way. Both directions don’t really seem to lead anywhere exciting, but your imagination gets the best of you and you can’t help but wonder where it goes.

You’d like to follow it, but you don’t. Instead you head on across it, back into the thick forest with your VHS tape and your personal slice of media still clutched to your chest. Back downhill you go. You pass the skeleton of something as you walk, it’s brittle remains tucked away in the cushion of dead leaves as it rests in peace. It’s vaguely deer-shaped, and the way it’s bones are arranged suggests it was curled up to sleep when it died. You give it a moment of silence before continuing on.

You’d press F to pay respects, but there doesn’t appear to be an F key around to press. Down near the bottom of this hill you find a house, tucked safely on the side of the hill where it’s least likely to be seen and least likely to be damaged in a flood. It looks empty as you approach it, no lights in the windows and no smoke in the chimney. It beckons.

The front door looks welcoming as you step up to it and knock. There is no answer. You try the handle and find it’s locked, so you go around to see if there’s a back door you can use. Around the side of the house and down the hill a little you find a pair of glass doors that lead into the unfinished basement, as well as a pile of cut logs in the grass and a makeshift forge and anvil. The glass doors are unlocked.

Sure, alright, we’ll just skip the spooky entrance to the house and go right to the basement, which is usually the worst part of any abandoned building. This basement is especially scary because it’s so unfinished, with only patches of carpet on the concrete floor and that weird pink cotton-like filling up in the ceiling between the wooden planks. You open the doors and walk in, shutting them carefully behind you. Pipes and air conditioning are all exposed in the ceiling of the basement, and all sorts of things clutter the walls and floor.

You walk through the path between the piles of stuff and wind up in front of a nice little unpainted door with a welcome mat in front of it. You do the polite thing and wipe off your shoes before entering. Inside you find a nice little room with the walls painted pleasant shades of blue, the floor made of wood with several colorful carpets covering it. This room is also full of clutter but it’s not as bad as the basement outside. Untidy shelves with all sorts of things on them line some walls, such as a radio, some tin bread trays full of ashes, art supplies, jars with murky liquids in them, candles, straw frames for four-dimensional cubes, various books, glass chalices, all sorts of stuff.

The window is half underground and looks out of a window-well, which isn’t the most pretty view at all, and the windowsill is completely full of different kinds of glass bottles. Some of them still have caps on them, some of them look like they were found in the mud. Several calendars and posters are hung up on the walls, along with some other stuff like paintings and a tack-board full of things and a bouquet of pink roses hung upside-down and pinned to the wall.

There’s a small and messy bunk-bed in one corner and a desk in the other, both of which are covered in clutter and things that could tell you a whole lot about the person living here if you looked close enough. You think you’ll have to dig around some if you want to find the second part to this VHS tape you have, which is labeled “Into the Sky Again”. Lucky for you somebody walks in through the door and looks mildly startled to see you, maybe they can help you find what you’re looking for.

She has messy brown hair cut very short and a generally messy and mildly frazzled look to her, wearing a wrinkled button-down plaid shirt with the sleeve cuffs unbuttoned and sweatpants and no shoes. “Dude.” She says, “how’d you get in here?”

You explain that the glass doors were unlocked, and then get right to the point and ask her where the second tape is, showing her the one you’re holding.

“Oh rad, you read my tape? I’m surprised anyone reads that shit at all, to be honest.” She moves past you to start digging through the clutter on the desk. “But yea I can help you find the second one, it’s a work in progress though. I’d actually be super happy if you read that too and stuck with me while I continue working on it. Hey, wasn’t the mspa reader stuck in doc scratch’s weird green house and kinda forced to read homestuck last time we saw them? Don’t we both qualify as the mspa reader?” She looks at you briefly with her unkempt eyebrows creased.

You shrug.

She goes back to fishing through the clutter. “Eh whatever we can call this all some weird surreal hologram in a room in Docs big spooky house, which also puts this whole forest technically on Alternia’s green moon? Wow this is getting more self-insert by the second, my bad. I’ll cut the shit in a moment, as soon as I find that tape.” She walks over to a shelf and starts digging there instead. “Hey, this might take a bit, why don’t you tell me a little about yourself while you wait? I love getting to know people, they’re very interesting.”

You give her a look when she turns around to face you.

“Ah, right, you can’t really say anything yet, unless you say it in the comments, and I don’t really want to put any words into your mouth that you wouldn’t actually say. Pardon me. Well whatever, you can tell me when I’m finished then. For now I guess I’ll talk for you while you wait.” She goes back to searching her shelves. “Excuse the mess, I wasn’t expecting visitors. Actually I was expecting you but I didn’t clean up because I’m a busy person, alright? Lots of stories to get lost in, lots of weird slash fiction to come up with but then never write, lots of work to neglect, lots of therapy to attend. You know how it is.”

You nod understandingly, whether or not you actually do know ‘how it is’.

She moves to a pile of things on the floor and starts digging there, pulling aside sketchbooks and three-ring binders and an entire 2L bottle of Mountain Dew. “One of the most interesting things about people is that they all have their own story, you know? They all have their own complex narrative that they are the main character of, with their own struggles and interests and goals and fears and dreams. I wonder what yours is.” She pulls out a blank canvas from the mess and gazes at it thoughtfully.

You look at her vacantly.

“You can, like, sit down,” she says to you, motioning at the floor and also to her chair in front of her desk. “I’ve got one of those spinny office chairs with wheels on it, if you wanna sit in that.” The chair has a large crocheted purple afghan blanket draped over the back of it, along with several teal towels. You sit in it and idly spin.

There’s a flower crown and a medal from space camp hanging on a mirror on her wall next to the closet, which is full of boxes and clothes and doesn’t have its doors installed yet. She continues to prattle on gently to you while foraging through her junk. “If I were to tell you _my_  story, we’d be here a while because I tend to get carried away with storytelling, and hey this isn’t even supposed to be about me, it’s supposed to be about you. This little mini narrative is supposed to be about you meeting me so I can have my little self-indulgent transition chapter and then finding the second part of ‘SkyStuck’, which I’ll go ahead and tell you is called ‘Out of the Silent Water.’ Also I’ve had it this whole time, I just went searching through my stuff so I could have a reason to talk to you for a little while.”

She pulls out another VHS tape labeled “OUTSA” and tentatively hands it to you. “It’s not finished yet,” she says, “but you can go ahead and start reading it. I lost my only beta-reader and editor a while back, so it’s a little lacking, but if you’d wanna be my beta reader and think you’d be up to the task of giving me good ideas on how to make it better, I’m all ears.”

You take it and look it over, comparing it to the one you already have, which is labeled “ITSA”, an acronym for Into the Sky Again. It looks like there’s more tape in the second one.

“Anyway so that’s season two,” she points to the tape labeled ‘OUTSA’. “I hope you like it, it’d be super cool if you did. You’ll need to find a VHS player for it though, there’s probably one lying around in the basement. Hey and like thanks for reading it, I didn’t really expect it to get noticed at all at first. I guess I should let you get back to your life now, and I need to get back to mine. It’s been nice hearing from you.” She shows you out her door and walks you out of her basement, opening the glass door for you as you head back outside. “Feel free to come back whenever, I’ll probably make you food and stuff and give you drinks. You seem cool. Bye.” She shuts the door, leaving you back out in the woods.

It’s stopped raining, you notice, and now all that’s left is the dew on the grass and the mist in the air. The sun is setting, so you head on back home. You’ve got a life of your own to get back to.


End file.
